Greedy Goblin

Tuesday, June 10, 2014

Business post: it wasn't because of the cyno jammer

You probably heard the story of death of the 60B worth of ratting carriers. However the killers (probably on purpose) misinformed the interviewers about the mistake of the victims. They claimed that the attacked renters died because of offlining their cyno jammer, allowing the gankers to bring in a dread that finished them off. While that dumb move clearly contributed to the magnitude of defeat, the ships were lost for two different errors. Errors that you should never commit while making ISK in EVE online.

The first can be seen on this carrier kill. Ignore the missing lowslots, it probably died during refit. The hull cost 1.2B. Highslot drone control units: 600M. Mids and lows 200M. All together 2B. Total kill report value: 3.7B. What provided the difference? Various expensive stuff in the hold and cargo bay. This is plain dumb.

A PvE ship is a tool for making ISK. The cheaper it is, the less time you have to spend to pay for its inevitable destruction. Blinging PvE ships is dumb as the bling provides a few % DPS increase at the cost of billions of ISK put to risk. Keeping something in the hold that you don't need right now is just plain dumb. Always keep your PvE ships cheap, so they can regain their cost faster and attract less gankers!

This leads to the second, more serious error. It was made days before the doom of the carriers. The soon-to-be killers were roaming there and tackled one of the ratting carriers. The blessed ratters warped their other carriers and saved it. Never, ever, in a million years fight back to PvP-ers in a PvE ship! PvP-ers are motivated by challenge more than anything else. They spent lot of time to form a fleet that could break the tank of multiple carriers, just to prove that they can. And because of the valuable prizes.

Your goal while doing PvE is to get ISK, not winning fights. So how about not taunting PvP-ers "you can't kill me be-be-be!"? Had they not broken the #1 rule of PvE security, they'd lose one (2B max, not 3.7B) carrier and never see these particular gankers again. Instead they challenged them and offered them multiple carrier kills as prize. Dumb, dumb, dumb!

If you are tackled in a PvE ship (outside of highsec), you can warp in only cheap PvP ships, like a blackbird or a destroyer to deal with fast tackle. Nothing valuable. Also, their cargo bay lacked the two most important anti-gank items, despite they cost less than 1M: the mobile depot and the mobile tractor unit. The depot allows you to refit warp core stabilizers. The tractor picks your wreck, forcing them to shoot it, losing half of the loot.

The only way to keep safe from PvP-ers is not giving valuable kills and never, ever giving them fights!

PS2: minerbumping is back on my bloglist. Despite I still believe that they are in cooperation with the Goons, the massacre they do among morons and slackers who fit their freighters with anything but tank deserves support. By the way the massacre shows how "fitting choices" are imaginary in EVE. Putting anything but reinforced bulkheads in the lows of a freighter is like putting small lasers to a Rokh.

It's probably worth noting that standing T3 fleet didn't have enough DPS to break the combined remote rep power of those carriers, so offlining the cyno jammer is indeed the stupid mistake that killed them.

Odd how you grasp this concept when it comes to PvE ships but not when it comes to grinding ships. Bombless bombers are used to grind structures for many of the reasons you cite in this post. The are not very attractive targets to attack because they are cheap yet they are reasonably effective compared to more expensive options.

"By the way the massacre shows how "fitting choices" are imaginary in EVE. Putting anything but reinforced bulkheads in the lows of a freighter is like putting small lasers to a Rokh."

Good to know....apart from:Freighter ganks are about as common as mining ganks (i.e. not really common at all), and unless you are flying a pipe they are of little concern,although, to read blogs and forums you would think there are gankers at every gate. If you fly the pipes daily, it would be more dangerous unless there was some way CCP had given us to tell if people had been exploded, like a map showing explosions, or an out of game killboard. The main risk is being one of the first guys into the camp, then bulkheads or not, you are going to explode.

I weighed up bulkheads vs expanders, and considered risk vs reward, and, as with max yield mining, the risk was minimal when compared to the reward. Much the same as when I don't use an APC to drive to work, despite it being the safest method of travel.Yes, I could get blown up in my freighter/JF, but, 5 years of flying the same freighter indicates that my risk is relatively small compared to the reward.Much the same as I could fly a cheap BS in missions and be afraid of gankers on gates, or I could fly the same faction ship I have been flying for 5 years without loss.

A dreadnaught requires all sorts of support ships/personnel for staging, logistics, and security. None of these extras contribute any DPS to the grind but are still required. When their 0% DPS is accounted for the comparison is much closer. All at a much cheaper price per ship and at much less risk.

Like I said. It is odd you understand these concepts when it comes to ganking and such but willfully ignore then when it comes to grinding.

Likely missed the key part in the whole story: had fun, would welp again.

Tense moments of trying to fight back and actually standing a fighting chance (again, it was said - hostiles were unable to break reps initially. It was the bad decision to offline their jammer that sealed the outcome) are the kind of stuff you talk about later.

Most of the time it doesn't matter if you got your hump shot off in the process - "I was there" moments trump all the ISK in the world.

Although Gevlon excellently analyzed the incident, I would say that the losses where, in fact, not as harmful as it reads on a killboard.A 2-3B ratting Carrier is refinanced in a couple of days in nul, that the reason why nul still attracts people.

Most people still do not understand the difference between pve (compromise between tank/dps) and pvp fits (maxburst dps) therefore failing too often...

If an area consistently provides PvE carrier ganks, gankers will consistently come for easy kills.

A successful PvE defense may contribute to the gankers putting in more effort until they win, but an easy win could also encourage them to come back time and again because they find the easy kills rewarding enough in and of themselves.

As for freighter fitting, that's a case of selection bias. The only data you can see is ganked freighters. However, you have no idea how many freighters are now safely going about their business much faster or more profitably by fitting other modules on the lows.